Top 100 First Novel Quotes
#1. My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'
Brad Thor
#2. An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!
Charles Stross
#3. It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami
#4. I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our personal matter, and society.
Kenzaburo Oe
#5. My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.
Donald McKay
#6. I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.
Helen Fielding
#7. When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.
Dani Shapiro
#8. The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
Billy Collins
#9. I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.
Danielle Steel
#10. If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
#11. Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel.
John Le Carre
#12. My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#13. Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history ... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.
David B. Coe
#14. At thirty-five, having spent over twenty years running varied businesses for my family, I decided to sit down and write my first novel. I had never written anything longer than a couple of pages till then and was foolishly attempting to write a hundred-thousand words.
Ashwin Sanghi
#15. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.
M.J. Rose
#16. You are afraid to write your first novel because you say " I am not a talented great writer " But you forget that nobody was born a talented great writer.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#17. All those who love thrillers will find in Michael Alexiades's first novel a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. It combines suspense and knowledge, experience and imagination. His grateful readers will now wait for the next.
Elie Wiesel
#18. In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
#19. Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'
Kate Atkinson
#20. I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.
Anthony Doerr
#21. I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
Jesmyn Ward
#22. Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
Anthony Marra
#23. When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure.
James Patterson
#24. I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
Ned Beauman
#25. When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
Joyce Carol Oates
#26. I have used Lenovo since I wrote my first novel. My old laptop broke, so I bought a new one, but still a Lenovo. It is one of my most essential devices.
Okky Madasari
#27. When I was working on my first novel, 'The Quilter's Apprentice,' I knew I wanted to write about friendship, especially women's friendship and how women use friendship to sustain themselves and nurture each other.
Jennifer Chiaverini
#28. My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.
Vikas Swarup
#29. I've always wanted to write an early reader. When I wrote my first novel, my goal was to make it an early reader, but it grew beyond the category.
Grace Lin
#30. Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art.
Chico Buarque
#31. My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
Maria Semple
#32. I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.
Walter Mosley
#33. I was 29 when I wrote my first novel. But I was 45 when I quit for good. I was a 16-year overnight success.
Richard North Patterson
#34. My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.
Daniel Handler
#35. I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.
Irvin D. Yalom
#37. Eliza Factor's first novel, 'The Mercury Fountain,' explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people.
Floyd Skloot
#38. With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.
Guy Johnson
#39. Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.
Terry Brooks
#40. I just want people to finish the book and say, 'I was entertained.' When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it.
Marv Levy
#41. My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.
Deborah Moggach
#42. The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.
Khaled Hosseini
#43. I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Toni Morrison
#44. SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#45. The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
Taiye Selasi
#46. I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.
Cynthia Ozick
#47. When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.
Martin Amis
#48. I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.
John Green
#49. Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
Barbara Kingsolver
#50. My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.
Nicole Krauss
#51. My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench.
Wilbur Smith
#52. The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
Khaled Hosseini
#53. I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.
Amanda Plummer
#54. In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.
Nancy Willard
#55. I wrote my first novel when my daughter was about six months old.
Gayle Forman
#56. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
Martin Amis
#57. The fact that I have always been deeply invested in politics, and African politics in particular, inevitably played a role in my first novel and, of course, in my decision to write about a handful of particular conflicts in Africa as a journalist.
Dinaw Mengestu
#58. This first print run of the first edition of my first novel, 'When The Lion Feeds.' back in 1964, is so rare it can fetch several thousand pounds at auction. I always wanted to be an author, and I decided to write about what I knew.
Wilbur Smith
#59. My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
Kate Christensen
#60. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
#61. Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.
Ellen Hopkins
#62. I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
Joan D. Vinge
#63. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness.
Steven Saylor
#64. I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.
Jojo Moyes
#65. My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
Bharati Mukherjee
#66. Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces.
Jill Ciment
#67. Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.
Maria Semple
#68. I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.
Lee Smith
#69. [Speaking about writing her first novel] You have to be passionate enough about it and I was.
Kristyn Van Cleave
#71. I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.
Jennifer Chiaverini
#72. When I published my first novel, 'Slammed,' I included lyrics at the beginning of each chapter from one of my favorite bands, The Avett Brothers. The overwhelmingly positive response from readers to those lyrics really surprised me.
Colleen Hoover
#73. At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Laurence Yep
#74. I've been a big fan of Joe Hill ever since his first novel, 'Heart-Shaped Box.'
Caitlin Kittredge
#75. I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.
Randy Alcorn
#76. I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.
Charles Stross
#77. I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.
Madison Smartt Bell
#78. I feel like I've got a novel in me somewhere, but that's something ... I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it, who's a writer as well, and he's nearly done with his first novel, and it's taken him 11, 12 years to do it. And I can totally understand; it's a long process.
Corey Taylor
#79. When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
Alix Kates Shulman
#80. (T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college ... Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.
Jincy Willett
#81. I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Amy Waldman
#82. I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
J. A. Jance
#83. Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.
Emma Straub
#84. The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.
Karan Bajaj
#85. Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.
Daniel Handler
#86. What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#87. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
Colm Toibin
#88. In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades.
Gayle Lynds
#89. Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.
Gary Shteyngart
#90. My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.
Mona Simpson
#91. Ernest Cline lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. This is his first novel.
Ernest Cline
#92. Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
#93. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.
Carl Sandburg
#94. It's hard to make a living as a novelist. My first novel 'Tapping the Source' made quite a splash in Hollywood, and people started asking if I wanted to write scripts. I quickly realized I could make a lot more money that way.
Kem Nunn
#95. I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.
Laini Taylor
#96. You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.
Patricia Duncker
#97. Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.
Jay McInerney
#98. Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.'
Jack McDevitt
#99. I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.
Karan Bajaj
#100. Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Rachel Kushner
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